Flexible 3D acquisition with a monocular camera

One of the key problems for robots and autonomous vehicles is the acquisition of 3D information about their environment. In this paper a flexible technique for 3D acquisition is proposed. This technique only requires an uncalibrated monocular camera. No prior knowledge about the scene or about the camera is necessary to build metric 3D models of the environment. In addition zoom and focus can be used freely. The feasibility of the approach has been tested on both real and synthetic data and is illustrated here on real image sequences.